Take part in our online survey exploring models used for timetabling of the sciences at GCSE. The Royal Society of Chemistry is working with the Association for Science Education, Institute of Physics, Royal Society, Royal Society of Biology and Shift Learning to gather feedback from those who have a strong knowledge of how the sciences are ...
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Do you teach chemistry to A Level, Higher or Leaving Certificate students in the UK or Ireland? If you do, we need your help with a short survey about your students' degere choices. We're seeing a downward trend in applications to study chemistry at university that isn't fully explained by any change in entries to pre-degree qualifications. We'd like ...
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As a professional body, we encourage all of our members to develop their technical and professional skills by undertaking continuing professional development (CPD). This can take many forms including formal, structured training courses. To help our members decide on valuable and appropriate training for their needs, we started a programme to ...
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Synthesis Explorer, the curriculum-focused resource to help study organic chemistry reactions, has had a face-lift and some exciting additions! It was originally designed to be used by teachers and students to introduce, explore and revise organic chemistry in an interactive and dynamic format. Features include:

an intuitive interface to access hundreds of compounds and reactions;

synthetic pathways on an interactive canvas;

a wide range of reactants, products and details of reaction conditions and reagents; and

More substances and routes have also been added to the planner, making it relevant to A-Level and beyond! We also include links to the substance pages in Learn Chemistry and Mechanism Inspector, giving more links to closely related chemistry.

Have an explore of the new site and let us know what you think, it’s been a long time in the making!

Henry VIII’s flag, the Mary Rose, has had a new museum open in Portsmouth today. The ship that sank in 1545 was discovered in 1971, and finally raised from the seabed in 1982 watched live on television in front of an estimated 60 million people worldwide.

The ship has been reconstructed just yards from where it was originally built. After resurfacing from the depths of The Solent, it was sprayed with water continuously until 1994 and then polyethylene glycol, a type of wax, in order to help preserve it. It will take 4 years to dry using air tubes in a ‘hot box’. Until then, the public will be able to view the wreck through windows.

In 2004, the RSC teamed up with the Mary Rose Trust, V&A Museum and the British Museum to produce the book Conservation chemistry – an introduction. The book is in three sections; each one led by a museum and discusses the chemistry behind the conservation of wood, plastics and stone, respectively. These sections can each be found on Learn Chemistry or purchased as the whole book from our bookstore.

The book shows how chemical techniques are used in conserving objects made from a wide variety of materials and seeks to introduce some of the ethical considerations of conservation to students. We hope this book will encourage teachers and students alike to see the chemical context of the most unlikely scenarios.

In Search of Solution is a collection of challenges, also known as egg races, which originally took-off in the early 1980s. Some of these egg races are competitive, others are investigative, either way practical problem solving with a chemical flavour has remained popular.

Some activities included teachers will have been doing for years, others will be new to them, but all are great fun. They can be used not only to enhance a topic taught in lesson time, but also as an end of term activity or in science clubs. But why should students have all the fun? They have also been used to promote chemistry to the public and inside there may be some good ideas for open days and for parents and governors!

Teacher notes are provided and give an indication of some of the approaches used by students and teachers when tackling the different problems.

Faces of Chemistry – like so many things, our popular video series started with an idea! We wanted to show students of all ages how chemistry applies to real life and how the latest cutting-edge research leads to many different new products and technologies.

It’s been almost two years since we launched our first videos. Since then you might have heard Meloney Morris from Syngenta explain how chemistry helps to protect crops, watched scientists from Procter & Gamble tell you about why they love developing new hair colourants or found out more about organic solar cells from BASF’s Ingmar Bruder.

We’ve loved making these videos and hope that you’ve enjoyed watching them just as much. But at the same time we thought that Faces of Chemistry could be so much more than this. We wanted it to represent all sorts of people doing all sorts of things with chemistry, not just those working in industry or academia.

So Faces of Chemistry has undergone a mini revolution.

And to mark the occasion, we’ve built a brand new microsite. It’s now mobile- and tablet-friendly, meaning you can easily flick through our features ‘faces’ on mobile phones, iPads, etc. whilst you’re on the go.

But we’ve not just made it easier to browse the videos. We’ve also added two new sections: ‘Inspirational chemists’ and ‘Careers with chemistry’ (coming soon) join the existing ‘Inside the lab’ videos. So in addition to leaning more about the chemistry found in many products and items that we use every day, you can now also find out what inspired others to become chemists and how diverse the career options with a background in chemistry can be.

When you visit our new Faces of Chemistry site, you will hopefully notice that it is a lot easier to find and play the videos you’re looking for. The Inside the Lab section, pictured below, is divided into three tabs for the different age groups. You’ll also be able to click the ‘view resource’ link below the videos to see all the Faces of Chemistry videos we have on that specific topic.

We’d love to hear what you think about Faces of Chemistry’s new look. So please do get in touch. And if you have any suggestions about what you’d like to see here, then feel free to let us know. We are always looking for your feedback (good or bad) to help shape our future developments.

Enjoy using the new Faces of Chemistry site, and keep your eyes peeled for the new Careers with Chemistry section coming soon!

I've long been a fan of Google Maps, and I was pleased indeed to see the combined efforts of Chris Lloyd from SSERC in Scotland and England's adopted son Andrea Sella, in the creation of two new chemistry landmark Google maps.

First, north of the border, Chris Lloyd has used the brand-new Google Maps Engine to create an interactive map of locations in Scotland in chemistry history, organised around three headings: Births and Deaths, Educational Work, and Workplaces, Monuments, etc. Use the menu panel to tick or untick the categories.

For England, Wales, France, and beyond, see UCL prof. Andrea Sella's Chemistry Landmarks map, showing "places where chemists and other leading scientists worked, lived, or died in the UK."

To celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, Education in Chemistry has teamed up with Spiring Enterprises to offer you the chance to win some molecular modelling kits for your school.

The task
We would like you to design a worksheet (a single side of A4) for a 16-18 year old student to teach them some aspect of chirality using molecular modelling, and submit it using the online form.

What are we looking for?

The judges will be looking for entries that show originality, creativity, clarity of communication, accuracy of science and appropriateness to the target audience. They will select one first prize winner and two runners-up. First prize is one Inorganic/Organic molymod (teacher) set and five Inorganic/Organic molymod (student) sets. Runners-up prizes (two available) are one Inorganic/Organic molymod (teacher) set.

Deadline
The closing date for entries is Thursday 1 August at 12:00 noon (BST).

Submitting your entry
Entries should be submitted using the online form. Full instructions and terms and conditions are on the entry form.

What next?
Winners will be notified by email by 21 October. Prize-winning entries and those judged as 'highly commended' will be made available as shareable resources on Learn Chemistry. Good luck!

Each theory chapter can be used in conjunction with chapters of Volume II. These are shown in the linked resources section below the main chapter (shown below). There is also information on how to use the resource, additional reading and a keywords index to show in which section which topics are covered.

Next month I’ll be adding In Search of Solutions to Learn Chemistry. Add your requests for the next resource in line to Talk Chemistry.

We recognise the Challenging Plants and Challenging Medicines resources contain a huge amount of information in the form of presentations, handouts, worksheets and experiment sheets for teachers and students. With 100 resources in Challenging Plants and over 50 in Challenging Medicines it is difficult to see how the resources link to each other and how seemingly biology-based resources are linked to topics taught by teachers every day.

We have now provided pedagogical overviews for Plants and Medicines, as well as spider diagrams showing how the resources link to each other.

The Challenging Plants Experiment resources can be seen as sets (shown below) of ‘preparation of salts’, ‘preparing and investigating inorganic complexes’, ‘analysing solutions using colorimetric measurements’, ‘rates of reaction’, ‘chemistry investigations’ and ‘plant chemistry/biology experiment’ – all areas a teacher needs to cover. These experiments can give a teacher the option to use a different experiment to demonstrate, for example, making salts, and do so with supporting material that gives the experiment a real-life context.

The handouts and presentations are also linked through subject areas (shown below). These materials can be used in conjunction withtheexperimentstoformtopicsandpossibleprojectwork.

We hope these will be a helpful guide to the mass of information available through Challenging Plants and Challenging Medicines!

They belong to Christmas like turkey and mince pies: the Royal Institution (Ri) Christmas lectures. Each year they bring a touch of science straight to our living rooms.

The lectures are fantastic every year. But for us at the RSC, last year’s ones were even more special, because they focused on chemistry.

In his three lectures, Dr Peter Wothers – a chemist at Cambridge University – explored the chemistry around us. Filling the TV studio with lightning, explosions and burning flames, he looked at air, water and earth – three of the ancient Greek elements that tantalised alchemists for centuries – and the chemistry behind them. It was a fantastic display of why chemistry is fun.

But don’t worry if you missed the spectacle when the lectures were aired on the television! The RSC and our Learn Chemistry team partnered with the Ri to turn the best parts from the lectures into a set of teaching resources.

The resources are based around ten chemistry-related themes that Peter covered in his Modern Alchemist lectures. Many of them cover topics you are teaching in the classroom, such as atomic structure and the periodic table, radioactivity, climate change, the halogens and the alkali metals.

Dr Peter Wothers demonstrates the effect of altering the amount of oxygen present in the air

We have included background information, links to video clips from the lectures, questions and ideas for group discussion to help you teach these subjects. And if you or your students would like to find out more about a topic, you can easily follow the links to other Learn Chemistry resources on related topics.